January 2019 report CAMS BeNeLux

A summary of the activity of the CAMS BeNeLux network during the month of January 2019 is presented. January 2019 was a typical winter month with a limited number of hours with clear sky. 10943 meteors were recorded, 5124 of which proved multiple station, or 47%, good for 1857 orbits.

1 Introduction

After a long favorable weather period over the North Western part of Europe in 2018 the normal weather pattern returned since the second half of November. December 2018 was a typical wet and cloudy winter month. Would January 2019 bring any surprises?

2 January 2019 statistics

To keep a video camera network functioning the volunteers who operate the cameras need to be motivated. A regular feedback with results proves an efficient way to encourage people to report their data on time. Most participants report their data immediately the day after the registrations. Some people report their data a little bit later but within one week. This way no red tape occurs with the data reduction pipeline.

So far, all months of January in the short history of CAMS BeNeLux brought the usual cloudy winter weather without any year with an exceptional favorable January for astronomical observations. The first month of 2019 continued this tradition with mainly unfavorable weather and just one really clear night. All other nights brought clear gaps of variable length between the clouds and as many as 9 nights ended without any single orbit.

CAMS BeNeLux managed to collect 10.943 meteors with 75 operational cameras at 20 participating stations, with 5124 or 47% multi-station meteors good for 1857 orbits. This is a remarkable good result, taking into account the unfavorable weather. Although less stations and significant fewer cameras participated compared to last year, almost the same total score in orbits was obtained. This is likely due to AutoCAMS being applied at more stations to get more out of each moment with clear sky. This proves the remarkable efficiency of the CAMS BeNeLux system.

At best 75 of the 88 operational cameras were active during nights in January 2019. On average 64.0 cameras were capturing per night. Only one night did not have any meteor registered. Thanks to AutoCAMS the surveillance of the BeNeLux sky was guaranteed with a minimum of 54 active cameras on all nights. On 22 nights orbits have been collected. The long winter nights may often start with an overcast sky looking hopeless to get anything like clear sky, but nights with up to 14 hours of dark sky may surprise with some unexpected clear sky. Casual observers often remain unaware of such clear periods, while the AutoCAMS observers get happily surprised when confirming unexpected meteors. A substantial part of the January 2019 orbits comes from this permanent alertness provided by AutoCAMS. Figure 1 and Table 1 show the evolution compared to the previous months of January.

Figure 1 – Comparing January 2019 to previous months of January in the CAMS BeNeLux history. The blue bars represent the number of orbits, the red bars the maximum number of cameras running in a single night and the yellow bar the average number of cameras running per night.

Table 1 – January 2019 compared to previous months of January.

Year

Nights

Orbits

Stations

Max. Cams

Min. Cams

Mean Cams

2013

7

49

6

6

–

2.6

2014

21

514

11

27

–

14.8

2015

22

880

14

39

–

26.1

2016

25

1037

15

49

10

34.0

2017

23

2058

18

55

18

42.3

2018

25

1878

22

86

53

72.0

2019

22

1857

20

75

54

64.0

Total

145

8273

Since the major expansion of the network in 2017, the number of stations and cameras remained stable since end of 2017. Bad luck and technical issues interfered at several stations keeping a number of cameras unavailable for some time. Especially the EzCap 116 framegrabbers proved rather unreliable and responsible for most of the technical failures.

3 Conclusion

The team members spent a lot of efforts to get some results out of mostly cloudy nights. Despite the bad weather still a very nice result has been obtained. The variable weather combined with long winter nights produces often some short intervals with clear skies. In many cases no chances for clear sky exist in the evening and therefore AutoCAMS is recommended to have all cameras running whenever unexpected clear sky occurs.

Acknowledgment

Many thanks to all participants in the CAMS BeNeLux network for their dedicated efforts. Thanks to Carl Johannink for providing all the data on which this report is based. The CAMS BeNeLux team is operated by the following volunteers: